Part 3 of 3, recounting the inspiration and process behind Dec 2010′s Last Meal. Here are the first and second posts.

After about a day or so to come down from our brief bout of cheese-choco-chicken-shoe gazing, we settled in on the task of building our meal from all 20 ingredients. A couple non-food items made it to the list: mom, fresh, red, etc, but we liked that. It added a subtle hint of high concept to the dinner without sending it into outer space.

But wait, there’s more. By now we had put a lot of effort into parsing this data and the payoff was that the mailing list started to come alive. We wanted to share this in a lightweight way with our diners without having to launch into a 30 minute diatribe before or during service. Nothing kills an appetite like a speech, so our very own Soomin Baik created an infographic:

Last Meal Infographic, by Soomin Baik. Click to Enlarge.

Soomin’s a very talented designer with an attention to detail that’s awe-inspiring (here’s her Last Meal expense report submission). This fastidiousness transfers into her mise en place and churro making, and we’re all better in the end for that. Did you see how she fit all those meal examples onto that page? Mad skills!

And so with a menu and a story, we closed out a remarkable year on December 18, 2010 with the Last Meal. 30 guests and 7 crew at the Beaver Studio in Lower Manhattan, a wonderfully spacious photo studio with a well appointed kitchen and friendly owners.

It took us 4 years to get to that list of 1,258 meals, and we’d love to get another 1,258 very soon. We had a great time putting this event together and I think it’ll become a Studiofeast annual tradition, with each year’s meal being built from only that year’s new submissions.

Joe, i’m with you buddy! T-shirt, yes please. Funny thing that when answer that question on my form i actually put “a meal infused with truffles, bone marrow & foie gras”. And THEN i read this. Odd, my mom wasn’t a good cook, which is why I am, and why i crave these luxuries.